Just brilliant. Thanks. As footnotes, you could add Samuel Gompers and Frederick Jackson Turner to your pantheon--old Sam always claimed he was a Marxist, and young Fred cited Achille Loria, another famous Italian Marxist (Gramsci cited him, too) in making the frontier significant in American historiography.
I am actually shocked that a journal that I assume has reasonable pretensions and/or claims to prestige would accept this paper, due to the intellecual dishonesty and/or methodological shoddiness of the paper. This should've been bounced by the editor due to the complete inappropriateness of the method to try to address the question, and rejected by reviewers for both that (in more detail) and how the question is framed. Just an overall failure of the publishing and peer review process, and the result is laundering this nonsense into the literature.
Great piece. Also pretty weird for Magness to make this claim that no one was intellectually grappling with Marx outside of Russian revolutionaries, if only because Gene Debs won nearly a million votes running for president as a socialist in 1912 and socialists were running for and sometimes winning various public offices across the U.S. before and after 1917, but I suppose he doesn't consider them legitimate interlocutors.
It's also just weird, weird, weird to take publications at all as a marker of what was being said and thought within academic institutions between 1880 and 1920, or academic institutions as a marker of general public culture and intellectual life. Neither really holds very well for that period--the academy wasn't then what it is now, particularly in terms of the centrality of publication; and it wasn't nearly as predominant within the totality of a wider intellectual public culture.
Charitably, I would say the influence of Marx on academics is an interesting question in its own right, but even there your points are on the money. Academics aren't hermetically sealed off from popular political and especially popular intellectual culture.
I usually feel pretty lukewarm about Twitter beefs, but man did this guy have it coming and man was it sweet to watch you take him down. I liked when he posted two full pages of German text to disprove that Weber cared at all about Marx when the relevant quote described him chewing out Spengler for ripping Marx off, and how Marx would be ashamed to see his work bastardized like that. The constant moving of goal posts, the smug douchebaggery--and these conservatives are constantly whining about their lack of presence in academia.
First, I immediately recalled my old friend Jon Wiener's article "On the Fetishism of the Footnote," published in Telos in the late 1970s.
Second, I recalled the moment eons ago in my Ph.D. oral exams when someone on my committee wanted me to comment on the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and whether the latter was a "bourgeois revolution." I said that I had no idea what any of the meant. Someone chimed in helpfully, "Well who were the philosophes? College professors?" I laughed and said, "Yes, of course. College professors have always represented the intellectual vanguard."
Which brings me to my final point: Who gives a rat's ass whether the academic mandarins were citing the mosty important and influential social theorist of the preceding century? A more interesting (and entertaining) exercise would be to determine who these folks WERE citing and whether anyone remembers any of them.
FWIW, in "The Seduction of Culture in German History," Wolf Lepenies points out that, for decades, not only did French sociologists never cite Weber and German sociologists never cite Durkheim, but for a good thirty years, German sociologists never cited Weber themselves. And, irony of irony, it was French sociologists such as Maurice Holbwachs and Raymond Aron who reintroduced German sociology to Weber!
Speaks to the proud ignorance of history that is such a feature of certain strains of economics; as if academic life has always worked in exactly the same way. As you note their argument is clearly disingenuous, but I think that’s one element in explaining how it got through a review process.
While not commonly known as a GoodTime Charlie (or even a Good-Time Karlchen), one imagines Fred and Karl having a beery laugh over a salaried pamphleteer at something called a “21st century conservative American think tank (‘Denkfabrik’)” making fun of Marx because his comprehensive system of social and economic analysis describing the exploitation at the heart of (mainly) British industrial capitalism was not triumphantly received by contemporary pastoral academics.
Actually, the forgotten and unappreciated thinker who probably most benefitted from the Russian Revolution was Hegel, who was at the nadir of his popularity in the late 19th and early twentieth century, when Communists started casting around for "predecessors" to Marx. Lucky for us!
Was talking with a lifelong Marxist friend who is also a sociologist deeply engaged with Durkheim and Weber. His take: "Weber was clearly impressed by and responding to Marx in a general sense but probably not as much as people retrospectively thought. And a lot of it probably was filtered through Sombart because it was Sombart who was posing questions for the day for sociology and politics more generally. Or his former student, Lukacs. There was also a lot less of Marx’s work to cite at the time so it was probably often through these secondary figures that his thought was addressed. But Marx is probably a lot less important for Weber’s work than has been thought. Everything used to be read as a response to Marxism."
"Similar to Durkheim. Like St Simon and Proudhon were much more important in the French context. Maybe one could say that Durkheimians wanted to treat St Simon and Proudhon as more important and ignore Marx but the review of Labriola’s book is cited because it was one of the only times Durkheim ever addressed Marxism. Obviously Marx and his followers are in the mix among European intellectuals."
Thank you for writing this. I was just curious, was Marx "well known enough" to become prominent in the rhetoric of American politics during the gilded age (1876-1914). Did Grover Cleveland ever give a speech denouncing Marxism? Are there complaints against Marx in McKinley's personal correspondence? Conversely, how often is Marx mentioned in the pamphlets mass-produced by US labor unions of that time?
Clearly, Marx was a big influence in Europe as you have so clearly documented here with the attention given to him by Weber and Böhm-Bawerk. I just wonder if the same was also true on this side of the Atlantic.
Ha! Perhaps everyone should have the privilege of writing a delicious takedown of Magness like this. Here’s mine from a few years ago: https://academeblog.org/2017/04/11/on-blacklists-harassment-and-outside-funders-a-response-to-phil-magness/
Just brilliant. Thanks. As footnotes, you could add Samuel Gompers and Frederick Jackson Turner to your pantheon--old Sam always claimed he was a Marxist, and young Fred cited Achille Loria, another famous Italian Marxist (Gramsci cited him, too) in making the frontier significant in American historiography.
I am actually shocked that a journal that I assume has reasonable pretensions and/or claims to prestige would accept this paper, due to the intellecual dishonesty and/or methodological shoddiness of the paper. This should've been bounced by the editor due to the complete inappropriateness of the method to try to address the question, and rejected by reviewers for both that (in more detail) and how the question is framed. Just an overall failure of the publishing and peer review process, and the result is laundering this nonsense into the literature.
Great piece. Also pretty weird for Magness to make this claim that no one was intellectually grappling with Marx outside of Russian revolutionaries, if only because Gene Debs won nearly a million votes running for president as a socialist in 1912 and socialists were running for and sometimes winning various public offices across the U.S. before and after 1917, but I suppose he doesn't consider them legitimate interlocutors.
It's also just weird, weird, weird to take publications at all as a marker of what was being said and thought within academic institutions between 1880 and 1920, or academic institutions as a marker of general public culture and intellectual life. Neither really holds very well for that period--the academy wasn't then what it is now, particularly in terms of the centrality of publication; and it wasn't nearly as predominant within the totality of a wider intellectual public culture.
Charitably, I would say the influence of Marx on academics is an interesting question in its own right, but even there your points are on the money. Academics aren't hermetically sealed off from popular political and especially popular intellectual culture.
I usually feel pretty lukewarm about Twitter beefs, but man did this guy have it coming and man was it sweet to watch you take him down. I liked when he posted two full pages of German text to disprove that Weber cared at all about Marx when the relevant quote described him chewing out Spengler for ripping Marx off, and how Marx would be ashamed to see his work bastardized like that. The constant moving of goal posts, the smug douchebaggery--and these conservatives are constantly whining about their lack of presence in academia.
Hilarious! Several thoughts come to mind.
First, I immediately recalled my old friend Jon Wiener's article "On the Fetishism of the Footnote," published in Telos in the late 1970s.
Second, I recalled the moment eons ago in my Ph.D. oral exams when someone on my committee wanted me to comment on the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and whether the latter was a "bourgeois revolution." I said that I had no idea what any of the meant. Someone chimed in helpfully, "Well who were the philosophes? College professors?" I laughed and said, "Yes, of course. College professors have always represented the intellectual vanguard."
Which brings me to my final point: Who gives a rat's ass whether the academic mandarins were citing the mosty important and influential social theorist of the preceding century? A more interesting (and entertaining) exercise would be to determine who these folks WERE citing and whether anyone remembers any of them.
FWIW, in "The Seduction of Culture in German History," Wolf Lepenies points out that, for decades, not only did French sociologists never cite Weber and German sociologists never cite Durkheim, but for a good thirty years, German sociologists never cited Weber themselves. And, irony of irony, it was French sociologists such as Maurice Holbwachs and Raymond Aron who reintroduced German sociology to Weber!
Speaks to the proud ignorance of history that is such a feature of certain strains of economics; as if academic life has always worked in exactly the same way. As you note their argument is clearly disingenuous, but I think that’s one element in explaining how it got through a review process.
While not commonly known as a GoodTime Charlie (or even a Good-Time Karlchen), one imagines Fred and Karl having a beery laugh over a salaried pamphleteer at something called a “21st century conservative American think tank (‘Denkfabrik’)” making fun of Marx because his comprehensive system of social and economic analysis describing the exploitation at the heart of (mainly) British industrial capitalism was not triumphantly received by contemporary pastoral academics.
Actually, the forgotten and unappreciated thinker who probably most benefitted from the Russian Revolution was Hegel, who was at the nadir of his popularity in the late 19th and early twentieth century, when Communists started casting around for "predecessors" to Marx. Lucky for us!
Was talking with a lifelong Marxist friend who is also a sociologist deeply engaged with Durkheim and Weber. His take: "Weber was clearly impressed by and responding to Marx in a general sense but probably not as much as people retrospectively thought. And a lot of it probably was filtered through Sombart because it was Sombart who was posing questions for the day for sociology and politics more generally. Or his former student, Lukacs. There was also a lot less of Marx’s work to cite at the time so it was probably often through these secondary figures that his thought was addressed. But Marx is probably a lot less important for Weber’s work than has been thought. Everything used to be read as a response to Marxism."
"Similar to Durkheim. Like St Simon and Proudhon were much more important in the French context. Maybe one could say that Durkheimians wanted to treat St Simon and Proudhon as more important and ignore Marx but the review of Labriola’s book is cited because it was one of the only times Durkheim ever addressed Marxism. Obviously Marx and his followers are in the mix among European intellectuals."
Thank you for writing this. I was just curious, was Marx "well known enough" to become prominent in the rhetoric of American politics during the gilded age (1876-1914). Did Grover Cleveland ever give a speech denouncing Marxism? Are there complaints against Marx in McKinley's personal correspondence? Conversely, how often is Marx mentioned in the pamphlets mass-produced by US labor unions of that time?
Clearly, Marx was a big influence in Europe as you have so clearly documented here with the attention given to him by Weber and Böhm-Bawerk. I just wonder if the same was also true on this side of the Atlantic.